I think some programmers try to think in the mindset of what laws would/wouldn't be violated if you could somehow fuzz-test a particular aspect of the court system.

I.e., if instead of an individual case, you could generate a million people who all tried to do every potential variation of breaking the law in that way, then what would the curve of the resulting judgements look like?

This can be a Good Thing, but it depends a lot on the courts not being lazy and taking shortcuts. When I was in front of a judge there was no disagreement as to the material facts of the case, but my guilt and my sentence were decided based on the Court's determination of my intent. The only evidence the court had regarding my intent was my own testimony and the differing hypothesis provided by the police officers I'd had a verbal disagreement with at the scene. Guess whose story they went with.

Sure, that's what's important after-the-fact if someone's getting mad at you. But that's very murky territory—the kind individuals constantly wander into because of conflicting motivations, but which corporations tend to stay well clear of.

Let's instead talk about legal liability, and how corporations seek to discharge it in their delivery of products/services.

If I'm programming a political auto-dialer, there are rules about which numbers it's legally allowed to call, and which numbers it legally cannot. It can't call people's cell-phones, for example. If I don't want to get the people who buy one of these things in trouble (and then get sued by them), I have to program this device to follow these rules.

In such a case, it's not a matter of resolving the mens rea from committing such an act anyway; it's a question of how to avoid getting into a situation where my motivations (or the motivations of the purchaser) could ever possibly come into question. I don't want to come into court with a defense; I want to be bulletproof from being brought into court.

So, now, an analogy: if I'm programming a lifelogging-drone-as-a-service that people pay to follow them around all the time they're in "public space"—which, from what I recall, includes commercial spaces without access restrictions, e.g. retail shops, but does not include private residences—then what rules must I program this drone to follow about "what constitutes a public space", to avoid me (or a customer) ever being brought into court on charges of surveilling private property? (It's okay if such rules are next-to-impossible to resolve from the limited sensory data + local regulatory databases the drone has access to. The point isn't to construct such a drone; just to speak of more cut-and-dry case replacement for a human actor.)